Orecchiette with Sausage, Tomato and Broccoli

First, I just need to make an announcement that a new baby has joined our family:

She’s so shiny, right?

The twins weren’t the only thing keeping me from blogging here. Our old stove had all but a tiny burner die right around Christmas, and even though I got this one back then it took almost THREE months to get all the pipes and installation complete. But she’s worth it. I feel like I am driving a Ferrari when I am cooking on it. Wait until you see how she carmelized the chicken and veggies in our favorite stir fry on my next post!

So, my inspiration to cook is sky high and the babies are sleeping more. To all my loyal readers – thank you! I hope you are happy to see some more recipes coming.

So let’s start with this delicious pasta dish I came up with last week. It’s that in between time in spring, when we have gone through all of our favorite cold weather comfort foods. Everyone’s favorite chili and beef stew have started to become much like our favorite wool sweaters and our boots – we’re glad you were there in December and January, but we want to put you away soon and bring out some new stuff for a new season.

Enter this Orecchiette with Sausage, Tomato and Broccoli Pasta.

Fresh Mozzarella is such a great reminder that summer days are ahead, loaded with Caprese salads and fresh herbs on the deck. But this hearty pasta dish still sticks to your ribs on these chilly spring nights.

The inspiration behind it is many Italian recipes combine this small, ear shaped pasta with broccoli rabe. I’ve seen one with just orecchiette, broccoli rabe and buttered bread crumbs on top. My kids think that broccoli rabe is a little bitter (I love it!) but they dig broccoli. I have also been using cut up sweet Italian turkey sausages as a short cut to making meatballs. My youngest thinks a meal without hot dogs or meatballs is really just a snack, so we lean heavy on quick meat around here.

When I got to thinking about what kids like, it made me keep everything small for them. Enter the cherry tomatoes, cooked until they burst their warm juices when you cook the for a few minutes, and this ‘cherry size’ fresh mozzarella. It isn’t always easy to find, so you could cube a large fresh mozz ball.

My kids loved this dish! And I loved how the garlic and sausage give this dish great flavor, while the combination of it gives so many great textures. Pouring on pasta water right at the end helps keep everything moist and helps to melt the cheese. This ones a winner.

Orecchiette with Sausage, Tomato and Broccoli (printer version here): 

Ingredients:

2 T. olive oil

1 onion, diced

5 cloves of garlic, minced

14 oz package sweet Italian turkey sausage, sliced

4 cups broccoli florets (or 1 bag of pre-cut florets)

12 oz orecchiette pasta (or other favorite shape)

1 package cherry tomatoes

2 packages of small mozzarella balls (also called ciliegine – just cube 2 large fresh mozzarellas if you can’t find them)

1 cup reserved pasta water

1/4 cup grated Pecorino Romano or Parmesan cheese

kosher salt and fresh cracked pepper

Serve with more grated cheese + red pepper flakes

Directions:

Put large pot of water for pasta on to boil with salt.

Heat oil in a large sautee pan, then add onions, cooking until soft about 5 minutes. Add garlic and cook for 1-2 minutes. Add turkey sausage slices and brown.

Meanwhile, add broccoli to boiling water and set timer for 3 minutes. Fill bowl with cold water and ice cubes for an ice bath to stop cooking. Check if tender using a knife, and when it is slightly tender, use a slotted spoon to plunge it immediately into ice water bath. Drain after 1-2 minutes.

When broccoli is removed add orecchiette pasta to the same boiling water.

Add cherry tomatoes to sausage pan, cooking for 1-2 minutes. Then add broccoli and mozzarella cheese. Drain pasta, reserving 1 cup of pasta water. Add pasta + water to help melt cheese and make a sauce to the same pan. Add a palmful of grated parm.

Serve with more parm and red pepper flakes, if desired.

Thoughts On Our First World Down Syndrome Day

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Sometimes our most definitive moments are loud – a birth, a death, an accident, a promotion.

But sometimes they happen quietly, in the smallest of spaces between otherwise ordinary moments.

I was thinking about this the other day as I was giving our baby Ronan a bath. About the path that led me to him, to being the mother of a child with Down syndrome. His birth wasn’t the defining moment for me – it happened much earlier, when I was a grad student working towards my PhD in Philosophy.

I was taking a course on French Existentialism – a lot of Sarte and Camus. My professor was a middle-aged gentleman with a Scottish last name and good sense of humor. In the course of reading the material, there was a section on the randomness of our own existence. I remember my professor expounding on the happenstance of our mom having an egg and our dad having a sperm and they met, and it was you, and if it had been a day, a week, a month later, you wouldn’t be you. It would be a different egg, a different sperm. Logically all of this is true. And the conversation was basically, as soon as you embrace this fact, as soon as you accept that randomness, then you get to move on to clear, rational thinking.  My professor had a pretty clear attitude that anyone who thinks differently is an intellectual peon.

So your existence was entirely dependent on two microscopic physical things meeting. And that’s it. Nothing more. He went on from there to discuss some other point, but I was stuck. Logically, this was true but it left out so much about human existence. Like you are loved, that you are known, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made. I was totally depressed by this idea. I know because when I left class and was filled with these thoughts, someone bumped into me, and they looked at me and said, “Geez, why don’t you try smiling. You look miserable.”

This strangers’ comments woke me up to how low I must have gotten while stuck on this idea – it actually showed on my face. I remember looking around after they said it, at the very modern campus of SUNY Albany in the throes of late winter, and everything was white and brown and stark, with sharp angles and no curves, nothing soft, no color or beauty or life or hope. The world view I was surrounded by – literally and figuratively – was so bleak.

It hit me right then, as I looked around: You get to choose. Beauty or bleakness. Meaning or Randomness. It’s up to you. It’s up to each of us. Either way, it’s faith. We get to choose which version to put our faith into. But what I knew for sure was that without that belief that you matter, that you mean something, that your life has worth and value, that you are loved, everything else we can talk about as humans falls flat. In that moment in between classes on a winter day, I looked up at the sky and thought: I choose beauty. I choose meaning. I choose joy.

And then my eye caught on a tree that was just starting to sprout tiny green buds. The instant I made that choice, I could see life, beauty, new growth.

It was shortly after this that I found out I was expecting my first child.

From the moment I glanced at a positive pregnancy test, I loved my child. And in the next heart beat there was a feeling to protect and nurture this life.

By the time I was seven months pregnant, I was in my second year of my Phd program, and I had to present a paper I wrote for my Medical Ethics class. The paper was on the ethics of aborting children who through testing were shown to have Down syndrome or other genetic problems. I chose the topic since I had a special needs sister. In preparation for this paper, I remember reading a book by a father who had a child with Down syndrome, and he listed all of the difficulties of life with him in his attempt to be honest. It was his account of how he experienced Down syndrome. But between the lines of his honesty, I remember it was clear that intellectual capabilities were very important to him as a writer, and that much of his difficulty came from his son lacking in this sacrosanct area.

My research also led me to a program at Mass General on Down syndrome education. The doctor who led this group was frustrated at how the medical community had previously treated Down syndrome. The goal of this group was awareness. They lobbied that if you look at the actual lives of families who have a child with Down syndrome, they are full of joy and happiness and report high quality of life, much higher than the medical community previously reported. They hoped to connect those who may have a baby with Down syndrome with those families living with those same children to at least explore what life looked like before they decided to abort.

Most people have heard the stories of unsuspecting parents giving birth to a baby with Down syndrome and being told, ‘they will never say I love you. They will never lead a normal life.’ So much fear. We don’t have to look too far in our past to a time when Down syndrome meant institutionalization, and in many parts of the world like China and Eastern Europe this is still the case. (Side note: these children are up for adoption and you can see their faces on the website for Reese’s Rainbow, and it will break your heart.) This group, I was excited to learn, was trying to dispel this fear through sharing stories.

As I researched this topic, I imagined what I would do if I had received this test result for the baby I was carrying. I could follow the logic of my professor for this course – a very liberal, funny, brilliant woman – who held, like my Scottish professor, that this child growing was just a random egg, and a random sperm, and if one of those things was ‘faulty’ then of course, like making a mistake with the measurements of ingredients while making a cake, you could just dump out the batter and start again.

But every cell in my body went against this idea. I fell back to that definitive moment in between my classes, in the courtyard where someone pointed out to me what it did to my soul to believe that one life is just a random occurrence. It can be erased like the period at the end of a sentance.

I realized that there was no way I could do anything but love my baby, with the same love that had sprung up the instant I learned that an egg and sperm had met. That wouldn’t change if they had Down syndrome. It would bring with it concerns and questions, ones that this program at Mass General was trying to address, but throw it out like cake batter gone bad? Erase like a period at the end of a sentence? Impossible. My paper argued that it is a form of selective prejudice that is morally harmful to society, since it impacts the way we view members of that group who are living. My professor made it very clear that she disagreed with my conclusion.

This type of thinking from the professors in my program weighed on me. Continuing to view the world in this secular, rationalist way was making me depressed. Later, a friend whose brother was a priest shared with me that the hardest time of his years in the seminary were the ones studying modern philosophy. I had loved getting my Masters in philosophy at a Jesuit college, couldn’t wait to teach philosophy in literature, and had loved my time teaching logic and ancient philosophy at Nazareth College in upstate New York. But here, over and over, my classes slammed the innocent. When we were reading Justice is Fairness by John Rawls, we were following his treatise about building a fair and just society that broke down barriers based on race, sex and economic status. I can get behind that, says every compassionate, rational person, including me. And then you get to the part where he is building it back up, and holds that if a citizen is mentally incapacitated then they are not protected by the constitution, since only the members of a society that contribute to that society should justly receive its benefits. That’s only fair.

Wait, I thought.  How did we go from making society fair and just to saying that someone with special needs doesn’t have the rights of the constitution? We all know the last time we had human beings who were not protected as equally as other human beings it looked a lot like slavery. Another student in my class was the mother of a child with special needs, and she raised her hand and asked, is he really saying that? Yup, said yet another professor who agreed with this view that faulty humans are less than. It’s the only way a truly just society can be structured.

While other biases such as racism and sexism (which are active in our culture for sure) would not be tolerated in a modern liberal philosophical text book, a bias against the mentally handicapped is supported, championed even, right there in black and white.

My travels in my Philosophy PhD program are certainly not the first time our society has revealed that we hold a deep bias towards those with disabilities. But for some reason that I couldn’t know at the time, it was intensely personal for me to simultaneously be a new mother and buy into the world view that human lives don’t matter unless they are smart, productive, successful. The contradiction between these two experiences, these two viewpoints – that life has meaning in and of itself, or it doesn’t – affected something deep in me. I grew anxious, and snappy. Debating these truths with people who were very satisfied with their choice that life is random and can’t be ascribed meaning grew so exhausting, and everything outside of my smiling boy seemed dark and heavy.

Based on how miserable my program was making me and how happy I was when I was with my son, a happy, healthy, chubby six-month old baby (and the lack of philosophy jobs), my husband and I agreed that it made sense for me to stay home and pursue writing and raise our family. After all of the arguing and emptiness of my philosophy program, it was a relief to focus on nurturing and nourishing things: food as a way to show love, motherhood, writing a novel filled with hope.

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I was remembering this whole path as I squeezed warm water over Ronan’s tiny body, his eyes staring at me, smiling when my eyes met his.

Many people in the world he was born into hold the view that he was just a random egg and sperm meeting. And when they met, they created a defective human. Faulty. Less then. Throw in some medical science to further prove he is just a statistic, and say that the fact that I had him and his brother at 40 was not the result of a meaningful creation, but one of pure, rational probability, since there is a higher incidence of twins and Down syndrome with advanced maternal age.

But what all these statistics and theories can’t explain is why having these boys has made me so indescribably happy. How Ronan is hard-wired for love, for innocence. That I feel a peace that I am exactly where I should be in this universe. How much joy he brings.

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That moment when I realized we all get to choose, and I chose meaning and joy, prepared me more than any other to be Ronan’s mom. And having Ronan feels like that faith was rewarded. Now I get to receive joy over and over again by being his mom. His life is such a gift – he has already touched his family and community deeply. He has already sowed the seeds of friendship with new friends. The same society that views him as not a whole person he is strengthening, softening, building, one person that meets him at a time.

The reality of these two world views doesn’t just play out in philosophy classrooms. Iceland just bragged that they eliminated Down syndrome by eliminating every child that had a positive prenatal diagnosis. Last month, my husband was at a work event and when a gentleman said he had two kids, he added they were pregnant with a set of twins, but one had Down syndrome, so they aborted both of them. When I saw one OB doctor in our practice and told her that I wasn’t afraid of Down syndrome, she indicated it was ok for me since I didn’t have a demanding job, unlike her doctor friend who (rationally) decided she couldn’t care for a Down syndrome child and do her job, so she aborted them.

I am not trying to shame these choices. They were operating according to the rationalistic philosophical tradition our society values. Throw out the faulty cake batter.

But I can say now why this view leaves so much out about what is good, about what it means to be human. Just as objectively holding that life is random hurt me down to my soul that day in my philosophy class, holding that a specific life doesn’t matter because of Down syndrome also hurts our society. We are diminished because those lives didn’t matter. Because their smiles are not here.

So how does a society break out of its bias?

By telling stories. By programs like the one at Mass General. As the philosopher Iris Murdoch says, by having a philosophy that can talk about love. She was also a novelist, and came to believe that ‘art goes deeper then philosophy’. What philosophy can’t do, a painting, a novel, a photograph can do. It can move us, it can touch our deepest selves. It can let us speak of love.

Murdoch’s idea that we need to be able to talk about love in philosophy and art gives me hope. It’s hard to talk about systematically, categorically eliminating a group of people like those with Down syndrome if we think – if we see – that are very capable of love. Love casts out fear. And if there is one main factor that leads to eliminating people with Down syndrome, it’s fear.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin did more to end slavery then any philosophical treaty, and it was born of a mother’s love. When the author Harriet Beecher Stowe lost her baby right after childbirth, she thought of the grief of slaves who were mothers and had their children forced out of their arms, and then wrote her famous book that changed society.

Writing and art can say things that were silenced in my philosophy classes – things like you matter. Your life has worth. You are loved.

So maybe the compassion that is being showed by mothers of children with Down syndrome will help people view this diagnosis differently. I am well aware that my voice is just one in a beautiful symphony happening now. And Ronan is only five months old. But I will slowly try to tell his story.

For anyone who gets a test result or a diagnosis of Down syndrome, know that it might test your faith. But you don’t need an existential moment about the meaning of life to know what to decide. You can just listen to the stories of how the mothers that chose keeping their baby had their faith rewarded with immense joy. You can see their beautiful children radiate joy. Choosing that their life matters will always be choosing joy.

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Loaded Potato Soup

I am excited for spring just about on every level, but there is one thing about the cold weather that I don’t mind holding on to and dragging into spring with us: comfort food.

Soup tops the list of comfort food for me, followed closely by anything with potatoes, so really this Loaded Baked Potato Soup is a match made in heaven. We are Irish so its basically in our blood to like this. If you’re looking to jazz up your St. Patrick’s Day menu, this ones a winner.

The first time I had it was at a book club where they read my book! I got to be a guest author. It was amazing to hear smart, lovely women talking about Anna and Andrew and Maine.  I was reminded again that everyone brings so much of their inner life to a book. I’ve recently heard several people describe reading a good book as a form of self care, and I totally agree. I always feel a bit unglued if I’m not reading a good book. I was so honored that these ladies had me, and I look forward to doing more in the future. Connecting with readers is so much fun.

This did not keep me from asking for the recipe for this soup, of course, because delicious is always delicious even if you are technically on the author circuit.  When my friend sent it to me I was even more intrigued by the title – it was a version of Panera Bread’s Loaded Potato Soup. You may want to tweak your seasoning a bit, I think I added a bit of onion and garlic powder.

I made a double batch of this right before our third (or was it fourth?) snow day and it was so lovely to eat the next day while we played and baby swapped. My kids could doctor it up just how they would a baked potato and everyone was happy, especially my husband who loves bacon and my daughter who loves mashed potatoes.

Soon, spring will have me eating all the asparagus and fiddle head ferns and pea pasta dishes but for now, a bowl of this soup and a good book is calling me. Especially since we are supposed to have more snow on Monday.

Think I may have to have a glass of wine with those.

 

Panera Bread CopyCat Loaded Baked Potato Soup (printer version here):

Ingredients:

  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 medium sweet onion diced
  • 4 garlic cloves minced
  • 1/2 cup cooked bacon bits or crumbs
  • 4 large Yukon potatoes scrubbed peeled and diced
  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 1 teaspoon dried parsley
  • 4-6 cups low sodium chicken broth or more
  • 2 tablespoons butter unsalted
  • 2 tablespoons flour
  • 1 cup heavy cream or half and half
  • 4 ounces cream cheese or sour cream room temperature
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

Garnish:

  • 2 teaspoons chives
  • 2 tablespoons of real bacon bits
  • Shredded cheddar cheese

Instructions:

  1. Add olive oil to a hot medium pot or dutch oven over medium heat.
  2. Add onion and cook for 2-3 minutes, stirring occasionally.
  3. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, for about 1 minute, stirring all the time.
  4. Add potatoes, bacon bits, dried oregano and dried parsley, stir to combine.
  5. Add chicken broth, enough to fully cover the potatoes. Cook on medium heat for about 12 to 15 minutes or until potatoes are tender when pierced with a fork.
  6. Once the potatoes have cooked, add butter to a medium saucepan over medium heat and melt. Whisk in the flour until completely combined and gradually add in the heavy cream. Whisk the flour mixture until smooth. With the heat on the lowest stove setting, let the mixture cook until it starts to simmer and is getting thicker, stir occasionally.
  7. Add the flour mixture to the potatoes and gently stir to combine.
  8. Using a potato masher, mash half of the potatoes or as mush as you want. You can also add the soup to a blender or use an immersion blender.
  9. Add the cream cheese or sour cream, and stir until it melted.
  10. If the soup is too thick, add more chicken broth.
  11. Season with salt and black pepper. Taste and adjust.
  12. Garnish with chives, bacon bits and cheddar cheese.
  13. Serve and enjoy!

This was originally posted on the Sweet and Savory blog here.